Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-10-29 The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by tabbott. In attendance were Voting members: andersk belmonte jbarnold jhawk jwalden k_lai mathmike nelhage quentin tabbott tilia paigep | aseering Associate members: asedeno Prospectives: ecprice kaduk price | ternus Guests: Officer Reports: tabbott: I don’t really have anything. MIT Computing Report: tabbott: The member from LISP machine land. jhawk: I understand that ISTAB meets Thursday at 5:15. People who care about student computing at MIT should show up and express something. quentin: The invitation is RSVP. You should not just show up. jhawk: I disagree, but you should RSVP if you can. SIPB Projects Report: tabbott: We have Debathena packages built for Ubuntu Gutsy, but they have not been tested. We would appreciate if people would try the packages tonight and let us know what goes wrong, so we can do a release. There are some problems with the interaction between OpenAFS memcache and Xen. quentin: Where are they? tabbott: In the repository; you change “feisty” to “gutsy”. nelhage: There’s a script to synchronize PTS groups from the Athena cell to the SIPB cell, so we can administer lockers in the SIPB cell without contacting sipb-afsreq. I’m going to be enabling that script shortly after the meeting. Tim sent out mail with all the current groups in the SIPB cell; we would like to manage as many of them as possible by the script. If you administer such a group, we encourage you to make a corresponding Moira group and ask someone on sipb-afs-req to add it to the sync list. There’s a blacklist of groups that will not be synchronized. tabbott: It would be a good idea if, while we’re doing this, we add group ACLs to lockers that currently just have a list of users. tabbott: In Debathena-land: we took general-dink and put it in the machine room to use as a build machine, since we’re having trouble using the virtualization project for that. Nobody has used dink for the last month. tabbott: sipb.mit.edu is hosted on scripts.mit.edu now. It currently serves a redirect to stuff.mit.edu. It would be nice if we moved our website to sipb.mit.edu and updated the content, so that it’s easy to get information about SIPB projects. belmonte: The sipb.mit.edu vs. stuff.mit.edu thing was argued over when stuff.mit.edu first started up, and I recall there was some kind of namespace collision and people wanted sipb.mit.edu for non-web services. tabbott: The IP address is still attached to penguin-lust; only HTTP and HTTPS are port-forwarded to scripts. jhawk: Dan from NIST came by and renumbered the switch they gave us some months ago to 18.181.0.4. tabbott: This means we can start attaching things to the new switch? jhawk: Yes. Office Report: tabbott: We have this old Mac laptop which showed up in the SIPB office apparently coming from under yaz. We don’t know what its origin is. kaduk: I moved it from the floor under yaz to the table. tabbott: That’s where our traceback ends. I think we should get rid of it; I’ll deal with deactivating it. kaduk: I’ll take it if nobody else wants it. tabbott: We also have a fax machine in the back of the office. I’d prefer if it didn’t live on some table space lying around somewhere. It would be good if we could set it up in a way that it was not consuming useful space. mathmike: Have users successfully used the fax machine? tabbott: I’ve heard rumors that they have. price: What’s somewhere more useful than where it is? tabbott: Previously it was blocking drawer space; now it’s taking up table space, but it isn’t close enough to the phone jack. We need to buy a phone extension cable and hook it up. jhawk: I’d just like to remind people that objects should not block the ventilation by the windows. kaduk: Perhaps it would be a good idea to allocate funds for the purchase of a longer cable. jhawk: [mumble about office supply allocation] jwalden: I’ll look into it this weekend. tabbott: quentin did an investigation as to where the drops are in the SIPB office. I can set up a meeting with IS&T about what drops we want. quentin: We made a paper map which has disappeared. The gist is that we have about 25 drops in the office, with about twice as many on that wall as on that wall. We are thinking we should ask for 40 drops, equally spaced around the office, which would give us 15 extra drops and be more useful if we want to move things around in the future. tabbott: The stapler which we’ve had outside the office as a service to users have been stolen. It seemed to be a popular service; it would be nice to restore it. jhawk: I’d like to remind the SIPB that we have mathmike to thank for this service. belmonte: We should totally report it just so it will go into the police log. quentin: So let me get this straight: you lost a stapler that was outside your door? jbarnold: Does someone want to build a homing beacon for our next stapler? tabbott: Alright, jbarnold, you’re responsible for a homing beacon design. mathmike: The other option is the fire alarm model: have it spray paint. quentin: There was a big email thread about getting a new Mac for the office to replace mariel-hemmingway. aseering and I and rayhe have talked. We’d like to propose getting a 24 inch iMac with 1 GiB memory (one stick) and a 500 GB hard drive for $1837. We can run both MacOS, Windows, and Debathena on it. Move to allocate $1900 for an iMac with these specs. jhawk: There are implications that buying this machine means buying software. How do you plan to handle that? quentin: Our current best mac is bobbi-harlow, which has Adobe CS 2. We’d want Adobe CS 3. jhawk: You’re planning to allocate money later? quentin: I or other people are planning to allocate money later. tabbott: What is the plan for this machine? Are we planning to encourage people to develop MacAthena? quentin: The plan is to replace the functionality of bobbi-harlow (but mariel-hemmingway is older so we should punt that). tabbott: Does this include a Windows license? quentin: Can we get a Windows license from MIT? jhawk: The answer is complicated. belmonte: It seems like a separable issue. price: It’s one component of pricing how much this actually costs. mathmike: It’s been a while since I heard what our current budget is. tabbott: Unfortunately rayhe is not here. <8-0-6, motion passes> tabbott: This means we’re getting rid of mariel-hemmingway. That probably means mail should be sent to sipb-office telling people to get their private data off of mariel-hemmingway. jbarnold: I move that we get rid of mariel-hemmingway and the old Mac in the machine room when the new Mac arrives. <10-2-4, motion passes> tabbott: The space under where quentin is sitting was the site of a horrible ginger ale spill. Somebody should get facilities to bring in a machine to clean it. jhawk: You want to talk to CAC. belmonte: I’ll do it. Education Report: k_lai: If anyone wants drawers, you should talk to me. quentin: IAP is sooner than you think. tilia: quentin, what class are you going to teach? quentin: Perl! tilia: jwalden, what classes are you going to teach? jwalden: I’m teaching one on Firefox extensions and one on hacking Facebook. tilia: You should all teach an IAP class! kaduk: There was an Ask SIPB column. quentin: It was on Athena hardware. price: There is no cluedump tonight. Next week, nelhage is giving a cluedump on exploit techniques. The week after that, there’s a cluedump on Debian packaging by one of the authors of the Ubuntu book. Go to for details. If you have topic suggestions, please talk to me. Other: jhawk: Tomorrow is the day before halloween, and this is the last term of 6.001, and it’s being taught by Gerry. You should all come to the last class before Halloween: 32-123, 10 AM tomorrow. Costumes are not required but encouraged. Making a costume is rediculously easy. All you need is a box-and-pointer diagram and a piece of tape. [Demonstrates on price.] belmonte: jhawk, I’m concerned that that might be lamer…than…nothing. tabbott: We’ve received this email about a student computing consortium with student computing groups at other universities. price: It has a clear potential upside, which is that we communicate with other groups and maybe they have ideas we don’t. At worst it’s harmless. tabbott: Their website has a brief description of each group. If anyone wants to prepare this brief digest for SIPB, let me know. Other Other: belmonte: Star Simpson’s hearing was this morning in East Boston district court. It was uneventful, and the proceedings continue in one week. Discussion Report: The meeting was adjourned at 20:05. Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.